LK Advani and the Ram Temple Movement have been colonized as a political project to underscore the history of Indo-Indian impulse. Since then, it has been seen on the lines of politics that this national discussion Had a major ideological intervention that could have been done without unacceptable Lampen. Violence with it, Of course, no one denies that it helped the party that had chosen the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the election;What causes or effect is a debate for elsewhere. We can learn this through this process.
What the BJP's current leadership needs to understand, however, is that without context we do not exist. So, to try and re-heat what it apparently thinks is the key trigger issue for the party's core constituency — a Ram temple at Ayodhya (and for many also at disputed sites in Mathura and Kashi) — and serve it up in time for the 2019 general election is likely to end as a damp squib. Because in the main, as this article will argue, the BJP is no longer seen even by its so-called core support base as the primary vehicle which will bring these demands to fruition. That does not mean these issues are not important for millions of Indians but simply that the RSS and its affiliates, which have been agitating for and providing the theoretical framework within which these demands gained currency over the decades, today have the organizational heft, intellectual tools and agitprop ability to press their case independent of the BJP and with whichever administration that governs India.
It was Advani's advent on the scene which, many conveniently forget, took the agitation for a Ram temple at Ayodhya and through it the project to promote a civic nationalism contextualized in an Indic civilizational tradition out of its crude, exclusivist provenance and made India pause and think about our nation-state's trajectory post-1947. From Rajiv Gandhi to AB Vajpayee and Murli Manohar Joshi, Narasimha Rao to George Fernandes, the leading political figures of their times, not to mention the intelligentsia, all grappled with this political-theoretical riposte to an emerging and very worrying — at least to most independent-minded, responsible citizens who did not subscribe to a doctrinaire Marxist, neo-Islamist or effete-liberal worldview — differential citizenship model premised on a negation of the notion of an Indian exceptionalism signalled by the overturning of the Shah Bano judgment and made their peace with it in different ways.
The impact of this engagement can be seen in contemporary India — from the temple-hopping spree of Congress president Rahul Gandhi during the recent Assembly polls campaign to the interventions by secular intellectuals on the zeitgeist of the Hindu/Indic tradition and the acceptance by sober thinkers of the Centre Right that lumpen violence needed to be quelled far more rigorously than it eventually was. But today the boot is on the other foot. Some of the successors of Vajpayee, Advani and Joshi in the BJP are unfortunately the rabble-rousers themselves while the Sangh Parivar has started throwing up many more thinkers of some ability, confidence and sophistication than it did in the past while its affiliates have acquired the organizational strength to demonstrate, agitate and protest to build pressure on issues close to their heart on all political parties (sans those which seek to de-legitimize it ideologically like the Communist parties).
Against the backdrop of such a landscape, the BJP, as a political party which was voted into power with a brute majority in 2014 under the leadership of Narendra Modi, is highly susceptible to the charge that it wants to rake up the emotive Ram temple issue for electoral gain just before the Lok Sabha poll. The feedback from the ground is if that is indeed what is tried, the charge will stick; if not wholly then at least very substantially. This is, naturally, not to suggest that as a political party the BJP does not have the right to lend its support to the agenda of its choice just as, say, the CPI-M has an unalienable right to demand the redistribution of wealth. All political parties also have to function within the parameters of the Constitution. It follows, therefore, that the BJP should have been working from the day it came to power four-and-a-half years to pass relevant legislation, including via joint sittings of Parliament if required given its lack of numbers in the Rajya Sabha, on this traction-generating issue for the party faithful.
But it chose, in its wisdom, to go for the low-hanging fruit such as supporting anti-cow slaughter agitations which soon descended to random vigilantism and led to a grotesque, violent and entirely unacceptable killing of human beings whom mobs set upon because they were suspected of being involved in cow smuggling/slaughter. Crucially, this issue was not something that needed to be put on the statute book as most States of the Union already had pretty stringent laws to deal with illegal cow/progeny sla.
